The latest tech news for business

Winners and losers of the social networking realm

Could the social networking bubble be losing some air? Perhaps not, but the shake-out has taken its toll on several pioneering sites. Tired of being an also-ran to the likes of Facebook, Yahoo! has finally sold Delicious, which styles itself as the world’s leading social networking bookmarking site. The buyer is AVOS, a start-up created by two of YouTube’s founders. Yahoo! has a less than glorious track-record when it comes to acquisitions, so presumably the remaining loyal users of Delicious hope the change is for the better. Users of Flock, another social networking also-ran, are less fortunate as that site has just closed. Flock offered a “social network browser” — a variant on the web browser aimed at social networking — but any advantage it may have had over conventional browsers has clearly dwindled over time. Flock was bought earlier this year by Zynga, best known for its FarmVille social networking game. Friendster, a one-time rival to Facebook, has also decided to throw in the towel, at least as a conventional social networking site. Users have until the end of this month to retrieve any photos, blog posts and messages, as the “new and improved” Friendster planned for the future will not apparently be needing them. No match for the mighty Facebook, MySpace, another pioneer, has seen its popularity dwindle and is currently up for sale. The trials and tribulations of these consumer social networking sites may seem of marginal relevance to mainstream businesses. But the enterprise social networking industry is currently enjoying a boom similar to that experienced by consumer social networking pioneers five years earlier. A shake-out for these business-focused sites may be further out, but business decision-makers need to be aware today of the consequences of backing the wrong social networking horse.

VMware buys SlideRocket

VMware, specialist in infrastructure software, is buying SlideRocket, which makes a cloud-based alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint. Love it or loath it, when it comes to presentations, almost all business people use Microsoft’s workhorse. But VMware hopes to teach old dogs new tricks. The deal is unusual because, at first sight, presentation software does not offer obvious synergies with the virtualisation technologies for which VMware is best known. Nevertheless, VMware says cloud computing is blurring the boundaries between vendors of infrastructure and applications software. It sees SlideRocket as a good example of the type of innovative end-user applications that lend themselves to a new cloud-based end-user computing model. Presentation software is second only to email as the most widely used business application, so VMware sees SlideRocket as a “Trojan Horse” that will help popularise cloud-based delivery of productivity software. Microsoft, you have been warned.

SocialGuard to aid paranoid parents with Facebook-loving children

Israeli security specialist CheckPoint Software Technologies has launched ZoneAlarm SocialGuard for paranoid parents with Facebook-loving children. The product monitors children’s Facebook accounts for a variety of social networking threats but alerts parents only when it detects potentially suspicious activity. So-called “age fraud” — friend requests from grown-ups masquerading as children — understandably creates most anxiety among parents, but SocialGuard also monitors status updates and wall postings for inappropriate content, cyberbullying, suspicious friend requests from strangers and attempts to hack a child’s account. It costs $1.99 a month.

Google unveils Google Docs app for android-based phones

Industrial espionage just got a little easier. Google has unveiled a Google Docs app for Android-based phones that lets Google Docs users edit documents online using their phone. But the real eye-catcher is a feature that lets you capture photos using the phone and automatically convert any text in the photo into an editable document using optical character recognition technology. So, next time you take a photo of a restaurant menu — or surreptitiously snap a competitor’s confidential price list — the converted text can be instantly uploaded to Google Docs and shared with friends or fellow conspirators. The Google Docs app is currently only available in English and works on Android 2.1+ phones.